The San Francisco 49ers have taken a lot of heat for their selections in the 2026 NFL Draft. Head coach Kyle Shanahan and general manager John Lynch have defended their choices, but Shanahan’s recent comments about what he does to prepare for the draft reveals why San Francisco has struggled to draft well in recent years.
Shanahan said that he doesn’t start draft prep until February, and that there’s really only a two-month window where he’s watching film and studying players. He said he leans a lot on the front office and what they put together, but that he also gives an assignment to his position coaches to put together film of players.
Here's what Shanahan said on The Rich Eisen Show:
“If I don’t like their highlight tape, I’m not going to watch anything after.”
#49ers HC Kyle Shanahan noted that he doesn’t start watching college football
— OurSF49ers (@OurSf49ers) April 30, 2026
tape until February and he feels like he’s always playing catchup.
Shanahan stated he relies on the highlight tapes that the position coaches have to put together as an assignment:
“If I don’t like… pic.twitter.com/xdE7x00RPV
That peek behind the curtain is more than a little frightening. If Shanahan is indeed assigning his positions coaches this task, guys who presumably haven’t been watching very much college football either over the course of the NFL season, and then disregarding players if he’s not blown away by something his coaches have to produce in a short amount of time, then that doesn’t seem like the most ideal way to go through the process.
There’s no perfect way to do it, and every team has its fair share of hits and misses in the draft. But in recent years, the Niners have not hit on a ton of players. There are some players whose potential is still up in the air, but there hasn’t been anyone who has stood out as a huge impact player.
It seems the Niners are just set in their ways, have a process and their own internal evaluations, and they don’t care much what anyone outside of the building thinks. That’s admirable and one could argue that’s the reason they have hit on players like Fred Warner, George Kittle, Dre Greenlaw, and Deommodore Lenoir over the years.
But if that approach starts to bring about sub-optimal results, then they have to change the way they do things. If they don’t, then their aging core of players will eventually get old, injured, or ineffective, and the Niners will not have a crop of new players to replace them with.
Perhaps it’s that stubbornness, or arrogance if one wanted to be less charitable, which explains why this era of 49ers football has been so good.
But at the same time, it could end up being its downfall.
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